Supply Chain Stories is a series of recorded interviews with Chief Supply Chain Officers, COOs and senior operations leaders to provide advice, guidance and mentorship to the supply chain community.
Iñaki Balduz ex VP Operations International, Kraft Heinz
Seb Taylor, Head of Practice at Pod Talent, sat down with Iñaki Balduz to discuss his career journey across global supply chain and operations, what’s coming next and the lessons learned leading through transformation, growth and change.
Iñaki shares his progression, with engineering background moving into supply chain, developing through logistics, factory leadership and international roles over many years at Kraft Heinz. He reflects on key stages of his career including; the importance of factory leadership in understanding supply chain, building international supply chain structures, and navigating the shift in ownership to private equity and the changes that this brings.
The conversation explores how leadership evolves in high performance environments, with a focus on clarity, ownership and decision making. Iñaki also highlights the importance of culture, trust and developing teams as the foundation for delivering results.
We also look ahead to how supply chain is evolving, how supply chain can be a competitive advantage and be the real differentiator between winning and losing.
Key takeaways from Iñaki’s episode: Supply chain leaders need to think like business leaders, not just functional experts and this is becoming more prevalent. Experience in operations, particularly within a factory environment, gives you a deep understanding of supply chain. The future of supply chain will be shaped by those focused on resilience, digitalisation and AI with the most important being strong team with culture built of foundation of trust.
It’s fantastic episodes with incredible insights from someone who’s seen and achieved so much.
Highly recommend listening!
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7rz5RA3kGHuAaDbryCq7tv?si=a297d660555b4595